Back in the early 1990s, football and New Labour went together in a matchless synergy. Football had just been reinvented, a brand redeemed from the violence and tragedy of the 1980s and transformed into a glittering entertainment of multi-million pound TV deals, megastar players and managers who wouldn't have a sheepskin coat in their wardrobes. It was a world of all-seater stadiums where season tickets cost a month's wages, yet which still retained its powerful hold on its traditional supporters, even if they had to subscribe to Sky Sports to keep up.

At this distance, the parallels with how Blair persuaded us to see his recreated Labour party are too obvious to bother drawing. What was so brilliant – the reason why it worked so well – was the natural connection between mass politics and mass passion. Britain's favourite footballer married a pop star, New Labour wore Ozwald Boateng suits and footballing deity Kevin Keegan kicked a ball around with Tony Blair. They were made for one another.

This weekend, the Financial Times asked a leading Cameroon what, if new Labour's had been football, was the glue of the men and women at the top of the new Tories. Cooking, was the answer. The Jamie Oliverisation of politics. It's a smart thought. Jamie Oliver – this is why Sainsbury's love him – has put how we eat into the mainstream. Of course he is only one of a battery (that's as in cooking implements, not hens) of contemporary cooks who remind us to think holistically, but that is part of his strength. He has become synonymous with considering the nature of food, how it's grown, how animals are reared, how to preserve food's inherent nutrititional value. He's attacked turkey twizzlers, set up cooking schools for young jobless kids and cooked for G20 leaders and he does it for everyone (even if not everyone likes being told what's good for them).

The Jamie Oliver brand is green and organic and universal, self-deprecating evangelism in estuary English. Did he once call you a slag? He'll apologise. Can't mash a potato? He'll make a TV programme about you. Never cooked before? He'll show you how.

It transfers to what David Cameron is trying to do with the Conservative image as smoothly as a velvety béchamel. So if you remember Thatcherism, then understand, the Oliverisation of politics would say, that we've moved on: not malt vinegar now, but balsamic. Reject the fast food of politics, Labour's takeaway soundbites, its instant eye-catching initiatives. The Cameroons would like us to believe that they have thought about politics the way Jamie thinks about food, from the ground up.

In this world, Iain Duncan Smith's investigations into welfare reform parallelJamie's discoveries about school dinners. Jamie loves everyone and what's more, Jamie's shows show that if you give people a break, mostly they'll take it. What an advertisement for welfare-to-work.

But it's most effective, like the old synthesis of politics and football, for the way it expresses the spirit of the times. Cooking and eating are not just about people, and the way Jamie does it, they're hardly even about class. They're about the land and the environment, as Madeleine Bunting has written, the animals and people who provide and grow what we eat and at the same time shape the landscape.

They're about diversity, identity and place and at the same time they're about universal principle. They're about self-fulfilment, the pleasure of giving and the tangible, tasty and good-for-you expression of love. They're a good pinch of old-fashioned values, and a brisk grinding of exotic spices. They're rooted in Britain but they're marinated in abroad.

Even more important is what they're not about. They're not about toffs or taxes or MPs' expenses, any more than football was about the things Labour was trying to put behind them in the early 1990s – the trade unions, the bomb or the IMF. If the Tories can make voters believe that they are to politics as Jamie is to food, they're onto a winner.